The Direct2Guest project was a development effort for a replacement system for Marshall Fields’ furniture business. The application was to cover several areas of functionality: Order Creation, Order Management (Processing and Maintenance), Order Fulfillment. It was to interface with Target’s CRM, the Guest Database, both to harvest customer information and feed customer data. Other interfaces were Target’s legacy inventory systems, delivery systems, supply and warehouse systems.
Maryrose was initially drafted to the team to develop project plans and schedules for the then 12,000 hour effort. After preliminary probing, she had brought up the gap of an integration effort for all the development and the conversion from legacy systems. More importantly, the quality assurance efforts were just at ideation.
Maryrose was quickly volunteered to head the quality assurance. She developed the strategy, an unconventional modular approach to development intended to leverage a disproportionately large development work force. She defined the roles, resources, process, scope of work at each phase, checkpoints, acceptance criteria and simplified the presentation into a work breakdown structure. She granularly defined the acceptance criteria between the test phases which enabled a cost-effective fixed-bid, offshore approach. Maryrose worked with vendor Infosys to enable this model. The result was a resounding success — an on-time delivery of a quality product.
From this effort, Maryrose developed her quality assurance process and templates, all tools that she carries with her from engagement to engagement, making sure that her customer benefits from her ever-growing expertise.
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